January 11, 2013

"Why should they be forbidden to bake ginger-bread just because Joseph thought it bad for the stomach? Why the Imperial edict demanding the breast-feeding of infants? Why the banning of corsets? From these and a thousand other petty regulations, enforced by a secret police, it looked to the Austrians as though Joseph were trying to reform their characters as well as their institutions. Only a few weeks before Joseph's death, the director of the Imperial Police reported to him: 'All classes, and even those who have the greatest respect for the sovereign, are discontented and indignant.'"

Austria is our "History of" country today, as we proceed through the 206 countries of the world using the Wikipedia summaries. So much has happened in Austria over the ages. The "History of" project cannot begin to summarize the summary. I merely offer up a snippet, one thing that struck me as something that might have particular resonance. But it is only one of many things. For example, from 25,000 BC:

The Batoni oil painting depicts the historic moment that Duke Leopold of Tuscany reached into his brother's chest and pulled out his heart. He quipped dramatically and unemotionally, "Well. I'll be. You do have one of these after all." Whereupon the Emperor fell dead. The duke wiped his hand on his jacket and the red streak look became the fashion of the court thereafter.

I observed a Christmas mass in Vienna while on holiday one year. Vatican II makes it needlessly difficult to follow the Christians' mass in a language in which one has minimal competency, but I do recall the priest at one point talking about the Hearts of the Habsburgs, in their crypt beneath the church. The crypt is not terribly grand, but I have always liked the image, which (in my imagination) has a faint, pagan tinge of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhauser, and of Koschei the Deathless.

Joseph and Leopold were the sons of Empress Maria Theresa who initiated the German migration to the eastern lands. My ancestors originated from Hesse as indentured servants, left Hesse by a boat called an Ulmerschatel, in 1720. Those boats brought thousands of Germans up the Danube to the Austria Hungary territories recently won back from the Turks.

I've told the story of how the ethnic Germans left those lands at the end of WW2, so I won't bore y'all with it again.

Earlier today I read a parallel comment from the anti-federalist "Brutus" debating the broad federal power during the writing of the Constitution.

“This power, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city, and country-it will wait upon the ladies at their toilet, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages, nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlor, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bedchamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house, or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work, and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labor, it will be with him in the house, and in the field, observe the toil of his hands, and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE! GIVE! A power that has such latitude, which reaches every person in the community in every conceivable circumstance, and lays hold of every species of property they possess, and which has no bounds set to it, but the discretion of those who exercise it…” The Antifederalist Papers #33

How prophetic. Or perhaps since the same overreach was already taking place in monarchies like Joseph's, merely an astute observation of man's tendency towards despotism, even, or especially, in the little things.

Balfegor, in a couple of years when my grandchildren are a bit older, the whole family would like to see more of Austria. I was born in Linz, I haven't been to Vienna, that's on the agenda.

I thought Vienna was great for a quick holiday -- fun to walk around even outside the Innere Stadt; my sister also spent a summer there as an intern and loved the city.

Vienna is the only part of Austria I've ever seen. I'd like to visit the rest of the country someday. Preferably after I've had a chance to improve my conversational German though, so I may be waiting a long time.

The story of the Siege of Vienna nicely compliments the "western" defense of Christendom against Islam that Althouse was describing earlier under Andorra. Those Moslems have been relentless for centuries and may finally prevail.

We drove from Salzburg east all the way across Austria to Lichenstein and Switzerland when we were there a couple years ago.(Not far really, considering how small Austria is!) No time to wander, though we ducked off the main drag a bit and went over the Arlberg Pass (it was open, though quite a bit of snow). Made me wish I'd planned ahead better and got in a half day of skiing. Sigh.

One must visit Graz (Ahhhnold"s birthplace): the Landeszeughaus, the regional armory for the Turkish Wars with floors and racks of arms and armor; Schloss Eggenberg with its gardens and Bronze Age antiquities; Mariatrost Church; and the Schlossberg in the center of town. Worth the short train ride south from Vienna.

People don't realize how small Austria actually is. I once heard a Forrestry Minister from Austria state that the entire nation--all its mountains, lakes, rivers and cities--could fit inside the Grand Canyon.

Hmm, I was prepared to say Austria's last good century was the 18th, but it looks like that goes up in flames.

It was, 1680-1780, or thereabouts. Austria's period as a pillar of the anti-French European alliances, and also those years wherein they led the reconquista against the Turk, under Prince Eugen. The last siege of Vienna, the wars against Louis XIV.

But also the partions of Poland and the Hapsburg loss of Spain to the Bourbons. Of course, by that point, to talk of Hapsburg was once again, to merely talk of Austria, and not truly a Pan-European monarchy. Austria was so strongly tied up in the dynastic blood of the Hapsburgs, the modern Austria has never really found its rationale, its purpose. It is the state which was riven from its empire by nationality, but has no sole claim to a nation, being a cousin-german of Germany proper, and yet the Germanic remnant of the Hapsburg's multinational feudal empire. Once the Czechs and slovaks took away the northern provinces, and Magyar Hungary took her divorcee's half, and then lost most of it dicing with the Serbs, what was left of proud, cultural Empire, but in-bred, feckless, foppish Austria? Too proud to associate with the lumpen, crass Bavarians or barbaric Prussians, too isolated and weak to be anything of import on his own. And when he finally killed his pride and submitted to the family reunion, the shame that Anschluss brought! The state will never live that experiment in nation-statedom down, not for Hitler's thousand years.

"All the world has its burdens to bear, From Cayenne to the Austrian whips;Forth, with the rain in our hair And the salt sweet foam in our lips;

In the teeth of the hard glad weather, In the blown wet face of the sea;While three men hold together, The kingdoms are less by three."

If anyone is interested Frederic Morton's Thunder at Twilight is a fine book on Vienna right before WWI. He writes about the last Hapsburgs but also the young Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Tito - all of whom lived or spent considerable time in Vienna all at the same time.

Yes, most humanity seems in accord about murder, bearing false witness, and so forth.

But when the enforcing authority begins stretching too far into sumptuary and dietary laws, the people become rightfully resentful.

Both Government and Church tend to do this. They should mind their own business.

(A good reason to have both a Government and a Church - two authority centers that the People can play off against eachother and thus preserve their Liberty. Didn't always and forever work for the Roman Republic with the two Consuls, but ...)

Anyhow, second time such thoughts surfaced in this morning's news cycle (Drudge > Instapundit > Althouse > Lucianne). The first was at the first column top of Drudge: "Michael Savage: 'Nationalist' third party to challenge Republicans..."

My first thought: Jesus Christ! National Socialists???? WTF!!! A very ill chosen name.

Second thought, apropos balancing moral and legal authority centers - church and state: the weakness of the GOP, and this includes the TEA Party, is they want too much moral control.

i've spent a number of vacations in Austria. i'd recommend the following to anyone:

1. The Abbey at Melk2. wine tasting, biking, marille liquer sipping (apricot) in the Wachau Valley (particularly Durstein) 3. the Salzkammergut (lake district south of salzburg) particularly Hallstatt and St Wolfgang4. Salzburg of course. Don't miss the Dom and its cemetery and Mirabell5. Vienna. The music, Hofburg, Schonbrunn, Neuwein in Grinzing, schnitzels at Figlmüller's, the crypts.6. make a point to spend at least an hour in a cafe watching people in either / both Vienna and Salzburg.

My favorite times?

May Day, you aren't a proper village in Austria unless your Freiwillige Feuerwehr (volunteer fire dept) taps a keg on May Day and puts you up a Maypole at least as big as those clowns in the nearby Dorf. 70 feet plus in my experience :)

Spring in the high Alps

Saint Nicholas Eve (Dec 5th) when Krampus comes out and gives coal to bad kids and whips the young women while swilling free beer :)I very much enjoyed the Innsbruck version...

Chickelit spoke of the Seige of Vienna. Ther was another in 1683, when the Muslims had again reached the wals of the city. Vienna was saved by Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, and the largest cavalry charge in history. Jan led 20,000 heavy horse from the front to break the Turks...

Re: the statue - Prehistoric fertility goddess statues like this one (ie., fat lady w/ giant boobs and some truncated limbs) have been found all over the world. Didn't see this one on the Austria wikipedia. Per Wikipedia, Austria comes from Osterreich - eastern kingdom. Germans had designs on Austria for a long time.

The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Funny that at the same time in London town where humble civil servant and school teacher Arnold was working two jobs and hard-put to squeeze in a little writing time wherein he'd zoom in through those big natural spaces to a small individual shape, then ride right on in to the protoplasm inside where the whole new next cosmos was always waiting to be love-borne.

While just across town, cooped up inside squinting in the pall and covered with skin eruptions, sat scrawling a wealthy double heir (wife a Stuart from the King James line), deliverer of the masses Karl Marx, avoiding work and commerce, ignoring his wife and kids, and finishing up his abstract expressionist tome of solidarity with the masses.